youMICH outlines plan for student government election

On Sunday, youMICH — the only surviving political party from last year’s Central Student Government elections — nominated Business and LSA junior Michael Proppe and LSA sophomore Bobby Dishell as its presidential and vice presidential candidates, respectively.

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The pair will join candidates from forUM and momentUM in the presidential fray.

Proppe has served as the speaker of the CSG assembly since winning a representative seat in the March 2012 student government elections, while Dishell — an executive board member of the University’s Interfraternity Council — is a relative newcomer to CSG after being elected an LSA representative in the November midterm elections.

Proppe said he wants CSG to be an organization that helps student organizations and fosters cooperation among them.

“I think the culture of the organization comes from the top,” Proppe said. “People aren’t passionate about CSG, but they’re passionate about the student orgs that they’re involved in so that’s really where the passion for CSG has to come from.”

The party’s goal is to create a collaborative environment.

While increasing student connectivity seems like an abstract idea, Dishell said a tangible solution is creating a leadership network that would aim to bring student leaders together for issues and events and regular meetings.

“This leadership network would be able to collaborate,” Dishell said. “This leadership network would be able to support each other, and it would be able to spread the information, so campus in a year is going to be a much more interconnected campus.”

Another goal of youMICH is to continue the entrepreneurial mindset of the current CSG administration. In particular, Proppe said youMICH would like to introduce an entrepreneurship learning community.

LSA junior Laurel Ruza said other platform promises include an MCard app for students’ smartphones, a 24-hour café on North Campus and a survey that incoming students would take at orientation to connect them to student organizations in which they might be interested.

If youMICH were to lose the presidential election, Ruza said the party would still look to enact part of its platform.

“As party chair I look to our presidential, vice presidential candidates to get a lot of the things done, but I also look to our representatives,” Ruza said. “If we get some of our representatives — hopefully all of our representatives in CSG next year — they’ll be able to fulfill some of our goals.”

Ruza said youMICH wants to see that its representative candidates have their own goals, too.

Proppe boasts his experience as speaker of the assembly.

“Now I’m ready to take that experience that I’ve had in the legislature and move over to the executive side of things,” Proppe said. “Just seeing the process of writing a resolution getting this through and then carrying out the actions of that resolution is something that I don’t think a lot of people get to see within CSG.”

Proppe added that he plans to use his experience to better engage assembly representatives.

Throughout the course of assembly meetings, representatives and CSG members are able to discuss projects they’re working on or upcoming issues. Proppe said representatives are “underutilized” in these projects and issues.

“You need to be proactive in approaching reps,” Proppe said. “I think the assembly loves seeing the reps take charge on these sorts of things so giving them more opportunities to take charge on these sorts of things can go a long way.”

Proppe had actually not considered running for the position prior to accepting the nomination.

“I had initially expressed that I was not interested in the position,” Proppe said. “I wanted to continue to play a role in CSG next year, but I wasn’t sure what that would be.”

Proppe added that he felt compelled to run after he failed to see a “platform that resonated with what I wanted to accomplish.”

“I started to reconsider and, after chatting with a lot of other people, I’m really excited to be doing this and I wish I had made the decision earlier,” he said.